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Editorial Reviews

The adventure of one of television’s finest dramas continues on Blu-ray Hi-Def with the complete third season of the Peabody Award-winning Battlestar Galactica. The Colonies’ survivors have found their hopes of eluding their Cylon pursuers dashed by an invasion and occupation of their new home. As the fate of all human life hangs in the balance, friends become enemies, enemies become unexpected allies, and decisions are made that will haunt some people for the rest of their lives. Relive all 20 episodes of the season that challenges everything you thought you knew about the Battlestar Galactica universe. This 5-disc set features hours of extensive special features, including the extended version of the episode “Unfinished Business” containing 25 minutes of additional footage never aired on TV. You won’t want to miss a minute of the series considered “one of the best dramas on TV” (Time Magazine).

Amazon seems to have combined all the BSG download reviews and spotlighted my previously separate ones of both Season 3 Unbox and Story So Far, so I'm going to update this review to comment on the free downloads and focus on the ones you have to pay for in the other review.

BSG: The Story So Far is an interesting splicing of the highlights of the first two seasons. While now two seasons behind, it's good as both a quick catchup on older material as well as containing the added bonus of getting to listen to Mary McDonnell narrate the highlights of the journey through New Caprica through Roslin's eyes, which is interesting in itself. Like some of the best Unbox downloads, it also has better-than-DVD video quality, which is about as good as the series will look if you haven't gotten to watch it in HD. Recommended.

BSG: Phenomenon is a neat 30 minute tribute to the show by various celebrities, including Joss Whedon of Buffy fame, S. Epatha Merkerson and Jesse Martin of Law and Order, and numerous others. It's certainly a promo, but what's fun here is that the various stars don't seem to have been hauled in by the ear to talk up the show by the network; they come across as genuine fans who were just pretty excited to get to talk about how they started watching and what they love about the show (and beg for a walk-on cameo before it's over so they can see the sets and meet the cast.) Good stuff.

BSG: What the Frak is a hilarious 8 minute run through of the first three seasons with a rapid-fire tongue-in-cheek narration. Won't ruin some of the great lines here, but one example as Tricia Helfer struts: "There are 12 humanoid Cylon models. Some actually look like models.Read more ›

Battlestar Galactica's new incarnation is superb entertainment. The first two seasons were the best show on television, SciFi or otherwise. Huge themes, such as an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world born of the robot servant's revolt (the Cylons); or a theory of human genesis that posits sister worlds, is interwoven with minute intimate personal detail of fascinating charaters. Characters are explored - their pasts delved into to reveal their evolving natures. These individual threads are picked up and engage the main threads and build towards exciting conclusion after exciting conclusion. The central plot - humanity's struggle against the robot Cylons is nuanced as well. There are moments of savagery on the part of the humans, and moments of odd tenderness, vulnerability, and spirituality on the part of the Cylons. Like life, there is little black or white. Hated characters become humanized, then loved. Characters evolve and change. They are scarred by their experiences (physically and psychically) - and are never again the same. This all increases the sense of reality and our (the viewer's) sense of involvement. Many of the plots echo current events - New Caprica looks like Iraq, for example. The writing, on the whole, is exemplary.

Battlestar's staging succeeds as well. The special effects advance the state of the art for television. As others have noted, technology does not dominate. In fact, many key technologies are familiar - or even retro: they use telephone handsets with intermittent audio problems; guns shoot bullets; space fighters look like 1960s jet fighters; "Dradus" looks like contemporary radar; books are on paper (albeit with a trapezoid shape); their computers are not networked by design.Read more ›

I love BSG. So much so that I took a risk and put Unbox on my computer... however, there is NO OPTION to turn closed captioning or any sort of subtitle on. I'm deaf and I can't watch anything without closed captioning. Amazon, please make this fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and provide closed captioning. There's no reason not to.

Consistently the best thing about the ongoing BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series has been in its intellectual ambitions. While its predecessor and namesake, the Glen Larson series from the late 1970s, was largely a space opera, this series is actually a study in war, and attempts to cover such difficult ethical problems as loyalty, violence, torture, religion and class in a war-torn society (except this happens to be a society in outer space). But you often find yourself applauding the series more for its intentions than for its execution, particularly in this, its third season.

Season 2 ended extremely thrillingly with a leap forward in time of a year in the final episode when the fugitive fleet, after settling on an Earth-like planet, found themselves invaded and conquered by their Cylon nemeses. This season begins four months after that during the ongoing Cylon occupation; although the show's creators remark repeatedly on their pride concerning these first four episodes (which involve the humans having to escape the Cylons yet again) in their somewhat gaseous podcast commentaries provided as extras on their DVDs, these actually some of the least enjoyable and least original episodes of the series so far. The creators of the show seem to have tried too hard to push for contemporary analogies to Iraq and Afghanistan. The cinematography replicates the gritty stock and overexposed lighting of recent international problem films (such as RENDITION and BABEL), and the tone goes from the darkness of the previous seasons a bit too far into out-and-out bleakness. There are too many fancy torture scenes here (and in other episodes during the season), and it's a big relief when the fleet gets back into space.Read more ›